The 3 Best Exercises for Building Strength

Everyone needs strength. It doesn’t matter if you’re about to prevent 350lb human beings from crushing your quarterback, or you want to pick up your kids without getting hurt. Without the the proper amount of strong in your muscles, these tasks are herculean at best and can leave you open for an injury.

Unless you regularly do the three exercises in this post. They hit the body head to toe, crush the core and are about as functional as it gets in terms of real world carry over.

Plus, they are motions you realistically make every day: walking, picking something up off the floor by hinging or squatting. The exercises that deliver you to the promised land of awesome?

Picking up weights and ambulating, deadlifts and squats. If these were the only three things you were allowed to do in a gym, you’d build a ton of strength with these and with the amount of variations you can build up to, you’d never be bored!

This includes adding in a press component to both walking and squatting by holding weights over your head. A single arm press from a squat position is also a killer variation and is something you should work up to.

I’ve seen how well these exercises work first hand with the people I train, and they can work for you too. You need to follow a periodized program to obtain the kind of awesome I’m going to lay on you, but it is a journey that is definitely worth taking and one that I can help you complete.

The Strength Holy Grail

The three best exercises to build strength straight from my IMHO to your eyes on the page:

Loaded Carries Goblet Squats Deadlifts

These three beast mode ingredients hit every muscle fiber in your body, and when you master them, you can do just about any exercise that exists and kick its glutes back to the stone age.

Incredible exercise. It is a huge bang for your buck movement that you can get a on out of: grip strength, strengthened gait, better core, stronger legs, lateral stabilizer strength and quite a bit more. Its the perfect exercise for the beginner exerciser all the way to the most experienced weight lifter.

It is also great as a fat loss tool if you play it the right way. All of my clients do a variation of this every time they come in.

All you need is a pair of weights, some room to roam and your feet. Pick up the weights, walk a given distance, turn around walk back.

No room to walk? No problem. Simply march in place or balance on one leg holding the weights. If there was a perfect exercise, you’d be hard pressed to not include this in the vote.

One of the best ways to open up the hips, groove the squat pattern and build quite a bit of lower body strength. Like loaded carries, its a self regulating exercise that’s almost impossible to do wrong. Anyone can do it due to the fact that you can start with the box squat version and work way into better ranges of motion.

It also hammers your lower abdominal wall. Glutes, back and core all in one exercise!

You can do this with a trap bar, Olympic bar, dumbbell, kettlebell, sandbags, etc. A more hinge oriented movement involves more glute and hamstring recruitment eventually allowing you to move on to some serious fat loss doing kettlebell swings.

Train These NOW!

Unless you’ve got joint pain, an injury or are under the care of your physician (whom should ALWAYS consult before trying new exercises!). These are three incredible movements, very easy to learn and something that I can help you master. If you’d like to learn how to do these to build a bullet proof body, drop me a line and let’s get you building some serious strength!

Al has been with VeloReviews since 2009 (pretty sure that was when I started) as its Fitness Editor after reconnecting with original VeloReviews.com founder Jeff Helfand. A guest appearance on the podcast lead to Al joining the site as a regular contributor. "Finally putting his journalism degree to use," he began blogging in 2011 and his unique writing style has caught the fitness industry's eye. In addition to VeloReviews.com, his writing has appeared on TwoSpoke.com, DFitLife.com, FitApproach.com, Tony Gentilcore's "What to Read While You're Pretending to Work," IndustryOutsider.com as well as being a Fit Pro Expert for SweatGuru.com. He is an award winning (“Best Bay Area Personal Trainer," CitySports Magazine and “People’s Choice Award” winner, Palo Alto Daily News) National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) Performance Enhancement Specialist and NASM Corrective Exercise Specialist. He also holds a degree in Communications with a concentration in Journalism from Santa Clara University. In his spare time, Al loves hanging with his family, mountain biking, coaching baseball, and convincing people why Batman is better than Superman.